Last month I developed a very clever search tool for LinkedIn and this month I’ve developed another one. Last month’s tool was inspired by work from Irina Shamaeva and this month’s tool was inspired by the work of Steve Beckitt and his partner in SourceBreaker.com. Steve has written a blog about how it works and it provided a very clever and accurate way to search LinkedIn.

Recently LinkedIn has been limiting the searchability of free account holders as a way to encourage them to spend some money with LinkedIn. This tool does not replace LinkedIns search but it does offer an alternative that will give good albeit different results. The tool uses Google’s Index of LinkedIn public profiles and so it can search all these profiles for free without it ordering the results based on your connections. Steve has provided a technique that makes this type of search very accurate and the tool that I have built around this technique makes using it very simple.

The Search tool is available here. Steve and I produced the above video to demonstrate how it works.